Why Tina Fey Should Join Twitter

Most of those magazines are probably boring, too.Photo: Ali Goldstein/NBC

Tina Fey took to her video blog to field a question about why she does not use Twitter. She replied with a comic rant about how Twitter is a useless compilation of uninteresting people saying things she doesn’t careabout:

Fortunately, when you read newspapers, you don’t have to scroll through content randomly. You pick the content that interestsyou.

Twitter is like that, too. The overwhelming majority is total crap. But you don’t follow the overwhelming majority. You just follow people you find interesting. And I realize Fey is being funny here, but the premise of her rant is totally mistaken in a way that seemscommon.

If you’re Tina Fey, maybe you follow your colleagues in the comedy world, and maybe you follow your favorite writers, too. Do you like reading Ezra Klein? I like Ezra Klein. Everybody likes Ezra Klein. I suspect even the people who hate Ezra Klein secretly like Ezra Klein. He’s very well informed! So I follow Ezra Klein on Twitter, and if he (or any of the writers tilling the soil on his burgeoning blog empire) writes anything, he’ll send the link out on Twitter, and also share some interesting observations. So if you’re watching, say, a presidential press conference or something, you can use Twitter to watch it along with Ezra Klein and other the people you pick tofollow.

Now, it’s true that some of the writers I like also use Twitter to make boring observations about that night’s football game or entertainment award ceremony, and they should stop doing that, because writing “Wow” when Tom Brady throws a touchdown pass is not what I’m paying them, or not paying them, todo.

Like Fey, I started with a distrust/misunderstanding of Twitter, but quickly found it to be a super-efficient system for filtering out the crap I don’t want to wade through on the Internet and delivering the stuff I want to read, written or recommended by my favorite writers, to me. I also like to use it to trade quips. I’ve quickly grown addicted to it. I’ve seen enough writers go through the process — hate Twitter, get reluctantly dragooned on to it, discover you can’t live without it — that I attribute basically all hatred of Twitter to a lack offamiliarity.